How to Conduct An SEO Audit that Helps You Increase Your Website Search Traffic

Have you ever wondered why your website is not getting enough traffic from search engines although you have good number of articles?

Most beginners struggle to get more traffic from search engines. If you are one among them, instead of blaming yourself, start scrutinizing your website where you’re doing it wrong and found out website leaks.

Check where your website is lacking its direction, if your website is not getting enough organic traffic although your content is good there’s something wrong with your site on-page, off-page factors, keyword density or accessibility issues.

Here’s where you need to conduct an SEO audit to boost your website search traffic.

SEO audit? What’s that?

Before talking about SEO audit, it’s essential to first talk about the term SEO audit. It is simply a method of evaluating your website’s performance in Google search results. SEO audit involves in a number of areas ranging from site loading time to number of indexed pages on Google.

A proper SEO audit helps you achieve your blogging goals and increases your website traffic in no time (after making particular changes after conducting SEO audit of your site).

Before conducting an SEO audit, make sure to:

Perform a quick search on Google for your website

Check the number of indexed pages: use the keyword as site:yoursitename.com to see the number of indexed pages on Google search results. The more content your website has, the more pages it will get indexed.

Find out broken links: Use WordPress plugins like “Broken Link Checker” to find and fix broken links on your websites. Broken links are not at all good and Google will end up crawling unwanted (dead) links on your sites. So make sure to fix your broken links while conducting a SEO audit.

No index your tags and categories: Most beginners don’t know this: they don’t set “no index” for their tags and categories. If you are showing tags and categories of your sites in Google search results, it results in duplication which is a big NO. Google considers you have duplicate contents and you will get penalized. The best remedy for this is to use a free plugin like WordPress SEO by Yoast and no index your tags and categories.

Remove bad links using Google’s Disavow tool: If you unknowingly built a couple of backlinks from bad sites or article directories, make sure to remove them from search results. By having bad links pointing to your sites, Google algorithms like Penguin updates may penalize your site. So make sure to remove bad links from your site results, this can be easily done by using Google’s Disavow tool. Here’s a detailed guide on explaining how to remove bad links using Disavow tool.

Optimization is the key factor in SEO audit

Check if your site is mobile friendly: If your site is not mobile responsive, you will lose a lot of money and website traffic. Make sure to hire a designer to create a mobile responsive site or use mobile friendly themes like Genesis, Thesis etc. You can use this tool from Google to test whether your website is mobile friendly or not.

Check your website loading time: Without a doubt, your website speed makes a lot of role in SERP results. Google considers your site loading time as one of the crucial SEO ranking factors and if your site is slow you won’t get better results. So make sure to use less plugins, optimize your loading time and use a better hosting service to boost your site performance. You can use Pingdom and page insights tool from Google to check your website speed and what need to be done to improve it.

Analyze your on-page SEO: How good is your on-page SEO optimization? If you write articles without actually performing keyword research or doing on-page SEO, you won’t get any kind of search traffic for your keywords (unless they are not competitive). So always make sure to use your primary keywords in titles, meta description, image alt tags, interlinks and a couple of time in the body to get more visibility from search engines for your keywords.

Essential factors to be done while performing an SEO audit

Once you’re done with on-page SEO factors and basic SEO audit, it’s time for you to start doing few essential things to improve your SEO audit.

Check for duplicate contents: Make it a habit of frequently checking your web page contents in Google search results. If you find someone has copied your contents, file a complaint to DMCA and they will remove it from search results. Make sure no one is copying your contents and always focus on plagiarism makers. Check out these 10 free plagiarism tools to find out who is copying your contents.

Check whether your WordPress is updated: WordPress often updates it versions. As you might be aware of it or not, hackers are all around the globe and they often hack the sites that don’t update their sites with latest WordPress versions. Make sure to update your WP and also frequently update the plugins you use to secure your site from hackers.

Optimized URL structure: Use a simple URL structure as Google shows less characters in its search results. An optimized URL gives you better results in Google search results for your desired keywords.

Check your website’s accessibility: Does your website has XML Sitemap and Robots.txt file? As they both are essential if your website to rank well on search engine results. If you are using WordPress, you can use free plugins like XML sitemap to let search bots to easily crawl your contents whenever your site is updated.

How good is your Off-page SEO?

Few bloggers I know are not aware of what off-page SEO is. Off-page optimization is one of the crucial factors that makes or breaks your website search traffic. If you’re running n SEO audit for your blog, make sure your site is following few off-page SEO practices.

These Off-page SEO practices include;

Social media submission

Forum submission

Social bookmarking

Commenting on other blogs

Building quality links from other sites etc

If you want to increase your website search traffic, give off-page SEO the top priority. Otherwise, you will not see any traffic growth although you’re performing good on-page SEO for your sites.

Use SEO Browser to conduct a proper SEO audit

SEO Browser is a blessing for all the bloggers and web masters who want to frequently conduct SEO audit. By using SEO browser, you can see your website or blog like a search engine sees it. That way you will be able to find out all the flaws that your website has.

Have you ever done SEO audit for your sites? Do you have any more thoughts about doing a perfect SEO audit to increase website search traffic? If yes, please share your thoughts.

Thanks for this post! Haven’t tried out seo-browser.com before – this is actually the first time I’ve heard of it throughout my time researching about this topic.

Currently, I’m testing out SEO audit as a way to increase leads and customers to my services. For this tool, I’m using MySiteAuditor which appears to be similar with seo-browser.com. Expect with MySiteAuditor, they allow me to embed the code on one of my pages where visitors can run an SEO audit of their sites and receive a branded free PDF report from me.

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